Welcome to our monthly “Share it All” Family Household Spending and Saving Report (A REAL FAMILY BUDGET YOU CAN COPY THAT WORKS TOO!).

My mission for this blog is help others work towards financial and time freedom, and that means putting your money to smarter spending, smarter saving and then making sure you do some smarter living along with it.

So below you will find the exact tools and strategies I use with my family’s incomes for doing just that and our progress towards our ultimate goals.

Feel free to copy and use these for your own family, and I would love if you would like to share your budgets to compare using the hashtag #realfamilybudget too.

// Our Long term Goals

I take what I say and preach on this blog about creating a life of financial freedom and security, to create the balance of time and lifestyle of your dreams, very seriously.

Our family are working towards that very goal, and we are on target to hit it within the next 10 years, to retire early and live off our side businesses and investment increases.

In fact, with the power of compound interest and extra hard work than normal – it might be even sooner than that!

Our family knows the exact amount of money in Investments we need to reach in order to live off the interest payments indefinitely, and it isn’t rocket science.

// Our 2018 Money Goals

We have a few buckets of money goals this year ahead, to keep us on track to hit our financial freedom long term goal but also so that we can live life comfortable and plan for the future.

This includes saving each month towards a bucket of money for Christmas and Home improvements, Insurance bills etc.

Next we have a large goal towards Invested money for 2018, which is a stretch on our normal comfortable saving pattern on Autopilot.

Then we are planning on holidays throughout the year and next, so we have a budget goal for that account.

Finally, we wish to create a 6 month Emergency Money account.

This means if we lose our regular incomes we would have 6 month’s worth of money saved to cover all the essential bills and food & petrol.

It’s then our job to recover those incomes within that time.

I should say that if you follow my Budget planning video, you will know that we apply a 10% additional payment to our Mortgage and Car payments, so that we will pay those off earlier than forecasted but also it allows a buffer if we needed to remortgage to a lower monthly amount if we were unemployed for any reason – and not lose our home!

// Our May Budget

Start of the month, our main savings amounts go straight out on autopilot standing orders to our budgets so that we save without even questioning it.

We pay our future selves first, then use the rest to have fun and live life.

This means even our investments are calculated and paid at the start of the month, so that we are not tempted to spend that money first.

Our Food & Petrol money account and our Family Fun money is then our free money to manage the rest of the month as we see fit.

The goal is to spend it on things that bring us joy, and it isn’t a challenge to make sure we have some left over.

Any left over from these money accounts though at the end of the month is usually transferred to our Emergency Goal account or Invested.

No major bills for us this month, outside of my husband’s car insurance which we paid off in full using our Yearly household budget.

Another debt taken care of for the rest of the year ahead which is excellent.

We had a great month really focusing on having fun as a family, even though we managed to save a good amount of our Food/Petrol and Fun budgets through the lack of spending – we also had a good month with putting extra into our investing portfolio.

It is really exciting to see that our investment target will be smashed if we carry on the way we are with saving this year, and that it is generating extra money for our retirement and even potentially allowing us to retire early in a few years time mid-40s.

// What went well and what can we do differently next month?

This month we did spend some money in preparation for upcoming Family holiday in June, getting new clothes for the children and ourselves.

I also want to plan for having spending money whilst we are there, but with it being all-inclusive we technically don’t need to worry about costs to keep up fed and watered well.

Overall I’m over the moon to see our investments take a great increase this month but making nearly four times our normal monthly contribution in May alone – this puts up in a great position for my stretched yearly target as a family.

Be sure to check out my Youtube channel to never miss an update video on our budget, and for advice and tips on how to set up your own budget that works.